Hurricane Floyd wreaks havoc.

It looked like Hurricane Floyd was leaving the metro area with a light touch, but that was not to be. Commuter havoc, power and cell phone outages were the least of the problems.

When the sun began shining on Friday morning, Floyd's tail snapped like a scorpion, whipping up winds that toppled the Albanese Development Corp.'s construction crane at 24th Street and Sixth Avenue, killing one person.

Trees, limbs and leaves continued to pelt local roads, while parkways and highways suffered from full to partial closings from high water and accidents.

The water broke a dam in Rockland, and sewage seeped into drinking water. An area of Bound Brook, NJ near the Raritan River provided news copters and their viewers with the eerie sight of a burning building surrounded by water that firefighters could not control.

There were citizens rescued from roofs of their homes, and in Westchester, through the roofs of buses using a special armored personnel carrier, just purchased to help with a small flooding event, never thought to ever be so intense. But some were not rescued but swept away, and a few deaths were reported.

Ossining was under water, as was much of Metro North's Harlem and Hudson tracks, ironically covered because they were too close to rivers and reservoirs just recently parched.

There were 9,800 without power in Westchester, 57,000 in Orange and Rockland, and about 300 scattered in the city, mostly in the outer boroughs, where trees came down on lines.

In Connecticut, the Danbury Fair Mall was closed because no power was available, and a flooded AT&T substation in New Jersey knocked out cell service to many who owned them simply for such an emergency. More than a hundred thousand customers in the tri-state area lacked electricity, phones or cable.

New York City closed its schools on Thursday, opening them on Friday, just as many northern suburban schools were forced to close because roads were impassible for students, buses and teachers.

Most commuters took the warnings that service might not be available on Metro North and left early, creating a crush at noon and not five. By six, however, the rail line was facing downed trees with no way for workers to get to the sites of repairs. They began service once again in late evening, and a truncated service on Friday morning when Westchester commuters by and large gave up and stayed home with their children.

"Half the people were gone by noontime [on Thursday]," said Charles J. Mahoney, who heads operations at Tishman Speyer. The Long Islanders were trickling in, but he did not expect many tenants that day who lived in New Jersey, Rockland or Westchester.

The buildings however, had no problems that day.

"The storm a few weeks ago that brought four inches of rain in two hours prepared us," he said. That's when they found a few leaks and made repairs at a handful of their management sites, which include the landmarked Chrysler Building and Chrysler East, Rockefeller Center and the Equitable Center.

Cranes at city construction sites had been tied down, and the booms dismantled. On Friday morning, at about 7:15 a.m. at 750 Avenue of the Americas, it was thought at deadline that a crane was being restored to operating condition when it toppled, killing one worker and injuring two others.

Later that day, New York Crane and Equipment Corp. dismantled the Manitowoc 4100W SII Crawler Tower Crane, and the accident is under investigation, said Buildings Department spokesperson Paul Wein.

It was a sad ending to a storm that nearly just waltzed away.